The mountains have stopped waiting for a consensus 

The international consensus that formed on climate change is dissipating as geopolitics gets complex. However, climate impacts are getting even more severe. Whether because of the politics of the West or global economic concerns, the climate agenda is no longer understood through international targets alone. 

It is too late to be chasing a treaty-based cap on global warming, although the Paris Agreement has been the best global collective signature on climate action. The glacier collapse in Rasuwa in Nepal is a stark reminder that climate models and predictions made more than a decade ago are coming true. 

The highly sensitive Himalayas aren’t waiting on whether 1.5 degree C should be front and centre at the next climate conclave. They are already warming at 0.15°C to 0.60°C per decade – several times the global average of 0.74°C per century – and their rearrangement comes with consequences. 

What’s troubling is that the chunk of ice and rock that broke off in Rasuwa did so without warning. There was no glacial lake to monitor, no dam to watch, no water level that crept up to trigger an alarm. More than 900 lives have been lost, and it all happened so quickly that no early warning system could have done much. 

It thus stands to reason that the slow cooking of the mountains, as the world wrangled over climate finance, has given way to an irreversible destabilisation of the slopes and the fragile mountain ecosystems. 

India had its own Rasuwa back in 2021 when a rock-ice avalanche in Chamoli destroyed hydropower infrastructure and killed over two hundred people. It was treated largely as a freak event, but Nepal shows that we are already living through second-order impacts of climate change. 

Roughly nine years out of the last ten have registered negative glacier mass balance across the Hindukush Himalayas, and the permafrost that held mountainsides together is reportedly thawing into slush. It’s no surprise, then, that the roads, houses and power plants built there were built on a foundation that was crumbling. 

The problem is that these regions are home to millions whose food, water, power and livelihoods depend on the stability that the mountains were supposed to guarantee. 

As such catastrophes mount, the question is not whether they will happen again. For the global south, the era of adaptation is well underway, so when does the awakening arrive that we’re not doing enough to finance it? 

Perhaps it will arrive when adaptation finance stops being treated as mitigation’s poor cousin and becomes the primary line item. Or when environmental impact assessments account not just for what infrastructure does to the mountains, but what the mountains will do to them. 

Or maybe when the developed world and the West accept that the mathematics of emissions and survival are now different problems – and one has already tipped over. 

Also, let’s remember that the damage is not temporary. By several accounts, Nepal will take decades to recover. In the meantime, it may have to deal with a horde of climate refugees who will either need to be resettled elsewhere in the country or have to be moved to India or Tibet. 

These are difficult decisions on the best of days, not least because the surrounding regions too deal with similar challenges. What makes matters worse is that calling it resettlement does little to take away the social, economic and psychological impact on the affected. 

It cannot be easy for them to adjust to makeshift shelters till formal housing is allotted, or re-start farming in an area that may not support it at all. And if resettlement is rejected, as more money is pulled into post-facto reconstruction, does Nepal have the funds to compensate people for years on end? What about the other countries along the HKH? 

There is the familiar argument that the countries that are watching their mountains – and even coastlines and monsoons – come apart have contributed almost nothing to the emissions driving this. 

But if the world sticks to mitigation alone as a measure of climate action, crucial landscapes will be reshaped in real time, and the economic costs of inaction to preserve precious ecosystems will be insurmountable for vulnerable countries and communities. 

This is not to say that we must pivot entirely to adaptation. But building resilience in vulnerable settlements, creating hazard information methods, high-quality public works in mountain regions, and stress-testing against climate models should be a necessity. 

Making a strong adaptation policy now, providing resources for both mitigation in the long run, and combining strengths to achieve more is our only option. 

Nepal is showing us that we must build for a changing world. It is an alarm bell we cannot and must not ignore. 

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